On London’s riots, Vaughan Bell has an excellent piece on riot psychology and why crowd behaviour is a complex area that’s surprisingly poorly researched, and Tom Stafford writes about why the Daily Mail is so threatened by attempts to explain the British looting. Also worth reading are James Meek’s take on London: “This isn’t mixing. It’s the ingredients for something… laid out side by side & not being mixed” And some much-needed humour from the Daily Mash (A gigantic number of policemen on London streets does seem to prevent riots, it emerged last night), the Photoshopped Looter blog, and this from near my neck of the woods: “One youth arrested on suspicion of carrying a balaclava; his parents have been informed”

Confessions of a medical ghostwriter. She has kids with ADHD and quit after being asked to hype an ADHD drug

There’s a wonderful thread about arachnophobia on my G+ page, following a couple of whimsical questions like “Are arachnophobes afraid of scorpions?” Most interesting tidbit: most are less afraid of tarantulas than smaller spiders.

How autism fundraising organisations make adults on the spectrum invisible

The link is broken, same way as the beer one last week (which was never fixed, by the way is now broken in such a way that one can figure out what the URL is supposed to be; thanks for the improvement).

Sesame Street issues formal statement on nature of Bert & Ernie’s relationship just in case you were crazy.

Brin, if you’ve got time to write that someone on the internet is wrong, perhaps you’d have time to search by subject and post the correct link in the comments?
I gather that Ed is a busy guy and remember we as viewers are paying nothing for his news aggregating skills here.
I’ll start with the-
11 countries, 60 seconds, one lovely musical video (although, I do sort of maybe want to smack that guy, just a little)http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkdpqi_move-60-seconds-11-countries_travel
Perhaps we could all do our bit each week ‘cos I love sitting down on a Sunday morning looking at all these cool links.
I agree that the guy in the video is rather smackable – does anyone have a word for the rating of smackability of certain people’s faces? The “Guys called Corey” Index, perhaps?

I can’t say I like the linked article about real name policies on G+ and Facebook. And since I’m not so sure anything I have to say on the issue would be welcome (since I am apparently an “edge-case”) or even heard in the comments thread there, I’ll say it here.

There’s someone out there who knows me, or at least my ‘real’ name the way G+ are defining it. And I do NOT want that person to find me. They went to prison because of my testimony. But since it was so long ago and I was a minor at the time, there are now no existing police protections for me from them.

I just cannot stomach the idea of them finding me on G+ and having access to all the information that entails. Of being able to speak to me, and have others speak to me on their behalf whenever they so choose. I’m just barely hanging in there on Facebook because being a normal 21 year old kind of entails a presence on the ol’ FB. I won’t be joining G+ because my options of clamping down on my information seem more limited there (and that’s saying something).

People may say ‘just don’t join’ and I probably won’t, but it’s not that simple. If you’re a young person and not on FB you miss out on things. And the way things seem to be heading, if I don’t sign up for G+ the quality of other Google services for me will be affected. I don’t like that. No one likes being excluded. And my situation is far from unique.

The article points out that real names policies don’t really simulate the real world in attribution of statements, but it misses that G+ and FB are not just discussion boards. If I am followed in the ‘real’ world that is something the police would probably help me out with, if someone ‘facebook stalks’ me, I can’t do jack.

These links should now be fixed. You could just try googling the actual phrase. A lot of these come from stuff I tweet or RT, so the actual words in the description should show up in Google.

Also, yes, I have a lot of things to do. I’d love for all the links to work 100% but they won’t. So by all means point them out, but if they don’t work, look them up yourselves. All the broken ones were trivially easy to find by searching for the phrase in question.